WHCA: Daily Caller heckler 'discourteous'

6/15/12 5:15 PM EDT

The president of the White House Correspondents' Association has called today's "rude interruption" of President Obama by a Daily Caller reporter "discourteous," but said that the Daily Caller's status as a member for the White House in-town press pool is something that would need to be discussed by the WHCA board, of which she is a member.

"It was discourteous. It's not the way reporters who cover the White House conduct themselves," Caren Bohan, the current WHCA president and White House correspondent for Reuters, told POLITICO today, shortly after DC reporter Neil Munro shouted a question at the President while he was delivering remarks in the White House Rose Garden.

"The WHCA always encourages vigorous questioning of the president, but that does not extend to rude interruptions of the president in the middle of a speech," Bohan said. "I've thrown questions to the President before, but reporters typically wait until he's finished speaking."

The Daily Caller, a conservative website, is a member of the in-town White House press pool. But after today's incident many have speculated that it could lose its access to the President and to the White House.

"That is something that our board has not yet discussed," Bohan told POLITICO.

Following his exchange with the President, Munro claimed to have mistimed his question, though he later wrote an article defending his decision to press a president who, he wrote, "has often used this no-questions strategy when making important or poll-boosting announcements."

"Sometimes, the president does answer shouted questions. At the end of a March 23 Rose garden event, for example, he answered a shouted question about Trayvon Martin, a Florida youth killed in February," Munro wrote. "On Friday The Daily Caller asked a question as his speech appeared to be ending."

Many reporters who were at today's Rose Garden event disagree with Munro's characterization of events, noting that few if any reporters aside from Munro thought the President had concluded his remarks.